Patrick,

Hi Kurt, As far as I know you are the first to ever do anything at SPOC that could be considered research. Kudos!

Thanks, Patrick. I don't view it as research. Amateur spectroscopy, like aesthetic imaging or asteroid hunting, has just come into its own in the last 15 years because of the prevalence of CCD cameras and cheap advanced image analysis software. Frankly, I've always been confused when reading about apectroscopy - either amateur or text books. The books always present a confusing array of advanced Balmer series physics coupled with information overloaded black and white images of high-dispersion spectra. The high-dispersion spectra illustrate stellar classification in terms of spectral segments that you cannot see in the eyepiece or high-dispersion spectral lines that requires a $5,000 spectrometer to render. It all seemed to be so disconnected from the visual observing roots of the thing - going back to Pickering's day when all you had was a prism, bad film plates and a hand-lens. In the early Harvard days, they figured the stellar classification thing out without alot of, relative to today, high end gear. Now that I've made a start in stargrazing through a grating, it has given me some experiential grounding that makes the spectroscopy books real. Yes, there really are blue distinct blue, green and red parts of a star's spectra - that's why Johnson and Bessel filters are labeled B,V and R. That B-V color index whe read in star catalogues is a ratio that expresses a real physical thing - the relative apparent intensities of those purple-blue and green segements of the spectra. Most books on amateur spectroscopy focus on absorption lines and ignore that the most telling visual difference between O and M stars - the emission spectra intensity between the B and far I segments. Many of the blue segment absorption lines in F through M class stars shown in books can only be seen with a camera. I've found it very difficult to find good articles and books that really layout - a la a Messier Marathon guide for amateur spectroscopy - what are the prominent features that can be seen visually in a simple diffraction spectrometer for various classes of the stars. A few sources, like the FAAS site and Tonkin's recent book (from the Patrick Moore series) have some good figures and tables. I recently found a good figure in an Oct 1996 S&T article by Alan McRoberts. Today, I figured out that the Vspec software - the MaximDL or Photoshop of amateur spectroscopy - can be used to generate good synthetic images of the visual observing experience that include both visual absorption lines and relative intensity of the emission spectrum. (Again, many "prominent" absorption lines visually are invisible because they lie on a segment of the spectrum that is too dim.) I'm hoping to cobble a chart together that will, for visual observing, be an improvement over McRoberts' 1996 version. Hopefully, armed with that chart, I'll really know what to look for and what I'm looking at when using the Rainbow Optics grating at the eyepiece. Turns out it is not that difficult once you know what to look for. - Kurt P.S. - An asterism note: Most of us are familiar with the winter "G" asterim - the letter G traced out by Castor and Pollux, Betelguese, Sirius and running back up and ending in Orion's Belt. It is one of those major finding asterism like the Summer Triangle. The FAAS website's winter observing program calls that asterism the "Spectral G". Running through the major bright stars of the letter G asterism with a spectrometer will cover most of the major stellar classes.